Feature Stories

Marie Claire Lamah is a doctor from the West Africa country of Guinea, whose people experienced a serious Ebola epidemic in 2014–2016. Many doctors and epidemiologists from Guinea have offered their skills and experience, through World Health Organization (WHO) teams, to other nations battling outbreaks of contagious disease.

In the Ebola epidemiological zones in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, health care workers must stay alert, vigilant and careful. An Ebola infection could find them before they realize it is circulating within a patient who just came for treatment. Of the 162 health workers infected since the start of this tenth outbreak in August 2018, 65 died; 63%, or 102 of them, were nurses.

Aluak Bol arrived at the health facility anxious about the health of her 18-month-old daughter, Apen Magot Mabeny. She had a fever, excessive mouth salivation and poor appetite. She cried horribly when urinating, which was reddened.

Twana Bhembe witnessed the devastating effects of tuberculosis (TB) when her sister died from the disease in 2011. That was before she and her husband were each diagnosed with the disease, a year apart.

“These hands are our most important tools of work but can also be a source of disease and death,” the Nyiragongo Health Zone director, Dr Dan Kapuku, tells the Kiziba community members who have gathered to learn better handwashing practices in the era of Ebola and other infectious diseases.

Hypolite Mandala and his wife, Nadège, were among the first parents to arrive for the measles vaccination at Nzombi Health Centre in Masi Manimba, a village 400 km south of Kinshasa.

As Didier Mwesha passed his one-year anniversary on the front lines of the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the numbers were climbing still. As of mid-June 2019, there were some 2071 Ebola virus disease cases in the 12-month period of the tenth outbreak, with 1396 of them having passed away. And Uganda had just confirmed an outbreak at the shared border. 

It was the tenth outbreak for its neighbour, but it was the closest that Ebola virus disease had come to Uganda since 2012. When the first cases were reported in north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in August 2018, only 200 km from their shared border, Uganda health authorities braced with concern.

Days before the most important exams of his life – the exams that would determine the course of his future, Claude Mabowa’s older sister tested positive for Ebola

When 33-year-old Kanyere Vwatire first left a health facility, it was the middle of the night and she was running away.